The Land for the People

Terence Dooley is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, NUI Maynooth. He is author of the bestselling The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (Dublin, 2000). He was commissioned in 2003 by the Department of the Environment and the Irish Georgian Society to write the report A Future for Irish Historic Houses? A Study of Fifty Houses (2003).

In this first systematic analysis of the land question in independent Ireland. Dooley contends that agrarian agitation proved to be an important stimulus to political revolution during the period 1917 to 1923 and argues that the 1923 Land Act not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a major contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasizes the significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important (and controversial) government body operating in independent Ireland. It acted as a facilitator of social engineering, compulsorily acquiring lands from traditional landlords, large farmers, graziers and negligent farmers and passing them on to smallholders, ex-employees of acquired estates, evicted tenants and their representatives, members of the pre-Truce IRA and the landless. It migrated over 14, 300 farmers onto lands totalling almost 400.000 acres.

Introduction; Continuing the land question: agrarian disorder, 1917-23; The 1923 Land Act: its origins purpose and significance; Fianna Fail and land reform policy, 1932-48; 'Reversing Cromwell's policy': migration schemes, 1923-48; Ambivalent attitudes and changing policies, 1948-73; Land and the lost politics of independent Ireland, 1923-73; Conclusion; Appendices: tables; Notes; Bibliography; Index